The present invention generally relates to managing healthcare assets. More specifically, the present invention relates to systems, methods, and apparatuses for providing healthcare asset intelligence.
Healthcare environments such as hospitals must manage many different healthcare assets, often in very large quantities. In a healthcare setting, healthcare assets may include personnel, equipment, devices, and supplies. Because such a diversity of healthcare assets is present in all healthcare environments, managing these assets effectively can be quite burdensome. As a result, healthcare assets are not utilized in an efficient way in most healthcare environments for a variety of reasons. For example, each hospital in an enterprise may manage existing data sources in a customized manner that may not be compatible with other hospitals in the enterprise. As another example, there may be a scarcity of intravenous (IV) pumps in one hospital within an enterprise of hospitals and a surplus of the same IV pumps in another hospital within the enterprise. The most efficient solution to these problems may be for the hospital having extra IV pumps to meet the demand of the hospital having a scarcity of IV pumps. However, unless the two hospitals are aware of one another's supplies and demands, the most efficient distribution of IV pumps across the enterprise may not be achieved. That is, global sharing at the enterprise level may not be possible.
In general, the various data sources used by a healthcare environment to manage its assets are heavily customized to that particular environment, preventing the rapid development of applications that can be used across varying types of data sources. In many cases, even different departments within a single hospital may utilize data sources that are vastly different from one another. In such a situation, the execution of an application utilizing data from each of these different departments may be impossible or impractical because the data sources are so heavily customized. This problem may be even more apparent for enterprises that include multiple independent healthcare environments. However, converting all of these disparate data sources into a single format that will support such application development and execution is both impractical and overly expensive for most healthcare environments and enterprises.
Healthcare asset intelligence data is generated and can be expressed in a wide variety of ways. For example, healthcare asset intelligence data may include the number of hospital beds in a hospital, the hospital's annual operating budget, the work schedules of hospital personnel, the locations of the hospital's X-ray scanners, and the number of units of Type A blood available for transfusion, among other information. Healthcare asset intelligence data within an enterprise may be even more voluminous and varied. As a result, converting every source providing healthcare asset intelligence data to a hospital or enterprise into a single format may be exceptionally burdensome.
Because total data conversion is impractical and not cost-efficient, healthcare environments are unable to utilize valuable healthcare asset intelligence data in order to maximize their assets, achieve their business goals, and provide the highest quality care to their patients. With each healthcare environment maintaining its own healthcare asset intelligence data in a proprietary format, distinct departments within hospital (or distinct hospitals within an enterprise) are unlikely to connect their needs and interests, learn from one another's operations, pool resources for mutual benefit, or maximize asset lifespan and efficiency, simply because of their healthcare asset intelligence deficiencies.